For this week’s
blog post, I’d like you to reflect on the following Huffington Post
article. The article was just posted yesterday – so it’s brand new.
We’ve discussed vaccines and autism...and now this. Reflect any way you
see fit – from a science journalism perspective, ethics viewpoint, public
health vantage point, or otherwise.
From every perspective, this article makes very little sense. Theres no evidence whatsoever supporting Vanoli's viewpoint that vaccinations cause homosexuality, or any changes in the brain chemistry. At the very least, there were studies done on the connection between autism and vaccines. Vanoli might be simply making unfounded conclusions based off of that data, though. There is no real science in this article, as far as I can tell - I see no mention of any experiments performed by Vanoli, or of any experiments he references. Its not a national awareness piece, because its the Huffington post rather than an Italian site or an Italian newspaper. There isnt an expectation of legal or policy reform, and its frankly not even campigning for same sex marriages. It simply seems to be stating that this nutball is out there, spouting unfounded and groundless ideas about how vaccines affect the soul and the mind, and homosexuality is a disease, rather than a simple fact of life. I honestly dont know how to respond to this piece, because there really isnt anything to attempt to respond to. There seems to be no problem in journalistic ethics, because its a simple statement that "this man says this". The only real problem I can see with it is in calling it "science writing"; its written about a scientist, for given values of "scientist". As it is its simply a factual notation that this man has said this in Italy, and coincidentally mentions that there are some serious difficults for the gay rights agenda in Italy. But so little detail is gone into on the issues mentioned in the last few lines, that its a bare mention rather than an attempt at advocacy of any sort.
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